Music in Perspective

I love music. I have loved music for as long as I have played it, and even before then. As a child learning to fundamentals of the saxophone and encountering jazz, this love manifested as a single-minded devotion. Music was not simply a passion, a fascination, and an avenue to self-expression. My love for music was religious; music was sacred. If someone quoted John Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme” over a corny funk tune, it was not simply heavy-handed and distasteful; it was sacrilegious. Music was not just an art; it was a spiritual experience, and it demanded not only serious study, but reverence.

As a high schooler, I subscribed earnestly to this notion of jazz musician as hero. John Coltrane was this master samurai who honed his talent to honorably push forward the musical zeitgeist into a new realm of consciousness. He was a messiah who would bring about change on earth through the comprehension of his improvisations, the study of his harmonic theories, the inspiration of his dedication. Jazz music was serious business, and had to be treated as such. The Bad Plus, at the time a newly formed jazz trio with a penchant for interpreting pop anthems, was heretical. They dishonored jazz - I thought then.

Some background. In high school I had not found intellectual stimulation in any of the math or science offerings and was bored by the lack of rigor in our study of English and the soft sciences. I could have sought deeper academic stimulation, but my parents weren’t keen on skipping grades, and I wasn’t keen on sitting through 8 hours of school only to then commit the rest of my day to extracurricular study of the same subjects in which my school had failed to challenge me. Music, primarily jazz, however, offered a vast playground for my dormant mind. In jazz, I could explore structure, sound, emotion, history, and the physical craft of saxophone playing.

It was, in a sense, my salvation. During Advanced Placement chemistry classes, I would sit with headphones on listening to Stravinsky, under the tacit agreement that if I continued to get ‘A’s and didn’t disrupt the class it would be overlooked. As a musician, I wasn’t limited by my schools’ offerings. I could find all the knowledge I sought in records, in jazz clubs, after school at the Westchester Music Conservatory.

Looking back, the construct of jazz musician as hero seems absurd. It seems preposterous that I, a child with a dark sarcastic streak could ever subscribe to it. I displayed no such earnestness towards religion or politics, but music was different.

What Changed…

When I arrived at college (briefly Tufts, and then at Columbia), I discovered that not only were the academic fields that stymied my development in high school not intellectual dead ends, some (mathematics, physics, computer science) were considerably deeper than music. I found in computer science a field that could force me to completely reengineer my brain’s approach to solving problems. At every turn there was some new concept, recursion, data structures, object orientation, which blew apart my conception of what was possible in this world.

Before college, I had always relied on jazz metaphors to explain everything else. Politics, democracy, relationships, teamwork, abstraction, I believed, were all best understood in terms of jazz. Quickly, I realized that art serves primarily to reflect the world, and only sometimes does it truly affect it as powerfully as the greater forces of technology, science, and politics.

My love for music in no way diminished, but my reverence for it gradually eroded. Suddenly I looked at The Bad Plus and saw them not as sell-outs, but for what they were, a trio of men who happened not only to be talented instrumentalists but who are also blessed with intelligence and a sense of humor, capable of kidding on the square, interpreting pop music seriously and ironically simultaneously. My respect for John Coltrane’s musicianship in no way diminished, but I will probably never again regard it (or any other music) as sacred.

My experience over the past three years, diving from lucidity to cognitive dysfunction, losing memories, knowledge, at times friends, and slowly fighting my way back to an increasingly stable state has only bolstered my contempt for the notion of reverence in art. I love art, and I care deeply for it. But the idea that any person could truly take a work so seriously as to say that an interpretation is not only miserable, but actually offensive, strikes me as laughable.

Since adopting this more detached relationship with music, I have begun to realize how many of the musicians I really admire were capable of regarding their music with a sense of humor. Bach, in the first movement of his Partita for keyboard No. 2 in c minor, toys with his listener for an extended passage starting and ending a series of phrases on the same note, being overtly “cute,” simultaneously laughing at his own task in creating a partita and creating one, in my opinion, of unparalleled beauty. Charlie Parker, similarly, inventively and humorously inserts quotes of popular songs and children’s songs into his solos, even at a stage where jazz was already regarded as art music, and gaining performances in elite concert halls.

Other than this reflection on my own shift in disposition towards music, I can only add in conclusion that I feel that this detachment from the sacredness or seriousness of music is often lost in jazz and also contemporary classical music. Study and appreciation for the aesthetic are important and necessarily self-referential. But beyond the building blocks of making music, I believe that more musicians need to reevaluate the relationship between the music they make and the world in which they live. It is the job of the musician to make music germane to the world, not the job of everyone else to enter a musical bubble and retrieve from it packet of wisdom that has blossomed in isolation from the ideas and innovations that are actually shaping our society.